Entertainment

Facebook, Twitter Engineers Tweak Google's Social Search [VIDEO]

A team of engineers, drawn from Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, have rebuilt Google to "focus on the user" and re-jigger Google's recent Search Plus Your World changes, which put results for Google+ pages above sometimes more relevant pages like those on other social networks.

"We created a tool that uses Google’s own relevance measure—the ranking of their organic search results—to determine what social content should appear in the areas where Google+ results are currently hardcoded," the site explaining the proof of concept says.

The project, called Focus on the User, compares Google's new search results to those that would be, the engineers say, more relevant. One example shows Google's results for a search for "movies" — it pulls up links to Google+ pages for actors, IMDb and movies, even if those Google+ pages are used less often than the actors' Twitter accounts or IMDb's Facebook page.

Here's how the tool, which is also offered as a bookmarklet, works:

"If Google decides that it's relevant to surface Google+ page as a result in any of the areas where Google+ content is hardcoded, the tool searches Google for the name of the Google+ page. Then, the tool identifies the social profiles within the first ten pages of Google results (top 100 results). The ones Google ranks highest — whether they are from Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Quora, Tumblr, Foursquare, Crunchbase, FriendFeed, Stack Overflow, Github or Google+ — replace the previous results that could only be from Google+."

We already knew Twitter was unhappy with Google's Search Plus Your World changes. Since engineers from Facebook and other social sites also contributed to it (Facebook confirms engineers from Twitter, MySpace, Facebook and other social networking companies did, indeed, contribute to the project), we now have an idea of at least what their architects think of Google's update.

Check out the video above to learn more. And tell us in the comments, what do you think of this new tool? Would you rather turn up Google results like this?

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